May the Road Rise Up to Meet You: A Novel (23 page)

The memory ends there amidst stirring from next door. Pilar is awake, and Marcella shakes her head and rolls her eyes just to herself, knowing that this is as far as she will read this morning. It is perhaps better, she thinks for a moment, since she will revisit these books again in March, stirring up the memories on the anniversary of Abuela’s death that had once so devastated her just six months after she had given her the brush and the brooch and the notebooks now filled with her part of the conversations they never had the chance to say out loud. She closes the book and locks it away with the rest of them until that sad day, bracing for the onslaught, and the duties of an older sister—soon to be free of all of this—and perhaps … 
completely
happy … one day soon.

• • •

THE ARROYO WOMEN, LIKE ALL
women of any stature and breeding, were meant to be little more than functionaries in their own homes and ornaments outside them. Marcella’s Mama had certainly fulfilled her part of that requirement, serving as loyal wife, competent hostess of even the most unendurable business-inspired dinner parties, and silent companion at all manner of social occasions. She had endeavored to make sure that Marcella and Pilar learned proper social behavior and were educated just enough to interest a young man—but not so much that they would scare him off. It was only in this matter that she could be found lacking, having long ago lost control of the reins when it came to Marcella and eventually shifting her focus to the still salvageable Pilar. By now she governed Marcella, if at all, only through a sense of guilt and pity inspired by a moment of great emotion more than a year earlier when she had confessed to Marcella how much she envied her. And Marcella, seeing a woman long ago defeated and made entirely subjugate, generally allowed herself to be guided by her Mama’s appeals, except when they stood too directly in her way.

“I don’t see why I cannot go with you,” Pilar pleads as she watches Marcella get ready to leave late that afternoon. “You know that Papa’s business friends will all be drunk by then and I will be forced to stay and listen to all their bored talk.”

“Bor
ing
talk,” Marcella corrects, and laughs just a little at the thought of what her sister will have to endure for hours more than she will.

“Bor
ing
!” Pilar exclaims. “Marcella, how can you not take me with you to the recital? All those musicians which I never get a chance to meet when Papa is inviting all these bor
ing
businessmen to our house! I—”

“Whom,” Marcella interrupts.

“What?”

“All those musicians
whom
I never get a chance to meet.”

“O shut up!” Pilar protests, and throws a silk pillow from the couch at Marcella. “And I am sixteen now anyway, and Papa lets me go to the balls and concerts
without
you!”

“Well then you don’t need me.”

“That’s not … ooohhh … Marcella!”

“Pilar!”

“You are the worst older sister a person can ever have.”

“Could.”

Pilar throws another pillow—the last one within reach—and seems genuinely upset now. She is an admiring younger sister, filled with all the foolishness of most girls who have just turned sixteen, Marcella has often reminded herself. And the distance between them in maturity and seriousness of purpose is not so much due to any deficit in Pilar as it is to the surplus of these qualities in Marcella. She had long ago decided not to hold Pilar’s childish infatuations against her, realizing that
she
must be even more disappointing to have as an older sister than Pilar is to have as a younger one. Two months shy of her twentieth birthday, Marcella has never shown any interest in the young men Papa brings to the house with regularity. The American men do not generally follow the custom of arranged marriages, and Marcella never lets one get close enough to ever consider a proposal, so it has become understood that Papa will have to intervene within the next few years and find a European man whom she will be forced to marry. She has let the family believe this is what will happen, and has even laughingly discussed it with Mrs. Carlisle and Catherine, all the while knowing she will be her own woman soon enough. Still, Marcella has as tender a sentiment for Pilar as she does for anyone, and can play and laugh with her, sometimes at her, even if she has never been able to show her the error of the path her sister seems destined to follow.

“Are you coming downstairs?” Pilar asks, giving up on her sister sharing any more details of the evening with her.

And Marcella summons the will within her, rolling her eyes to elicit a laugh from Pilar, then stands up with noticeable reluctance.

“I suppose I must make an appearance,” she answers, and the two of them walk down the hallway together, the previous moments soon forgotten.

Papa had bought the house when it was just eight rooms and when Sixty-Third Street was the virtual frontier of the city—a “neighborhood” of unpaved roads and grazing fields. Even Mama had been unable to contain her disappointment at first sight of it since it was less than half the size of their house in Madrid and had barely enough room for the
six of them, let alone any servants. But Papa had quickly reassured all of them that it was only a temporary circumstance. He reminded them of the stench that billowed from the overcrowded slums downtown, told them that practically every boat that arrived carrying passengers—the
refuse
of Europe, he called them—only served to pack the slums tighter. And he predicted that the wealthy uptown families, those in the fashionable districts from Tenth to Fortieth Street, would soon be pushed farther north by the onslaught.

From the very beginning, he had insisted that they host a dinner party a week—limited to four or six invited guests by their early lack of space—just to show influential people what was awaiting them uptown once they grew tired of trying to hold back the waves of immigrants. And by now, just eight years after he made such a bold prediction, it has already come true in part, with the most fashionable areas of town extending north of the depots and slaughterhouses and breweries of midtown, reaching well into the Fifties blocks, with Sixty-Third Street seeming like a place to get in on quickly before it is too late. Their house has grown along with Papa’s business interests, now boasting sixteen rooms and staffed by a half-dozen servants. And the dinner parties, though far less frequent than before, are now two or three times as large, with her brothers, as men of the business world now, inviting their own associates to go along with Papa’s.

Among the many annoying friends of her brothers there are only two, Marshall Varrick and Peter Septon, whom Marcella finds to be generally quite tolerable. Perhaps it is because they do not call her brothers Mickey and Barto as most of their other acquaintances do. Perhaps it is because they display at least
some
intelligence and a sense of humor. But more likely than anything, it is because they have already lost more than two hundred dollars each to Marcella in the card games she sometimes manages to talk her way into when Miguel and Bartolomé bring friends back to the house much the worse for brandy and looking to extend the evening’s amusements. She is equally accommodating to all of her brothers’ friends when it comes to cards, but Marshall Varrick and Peter Septon at least lose with dignity.

Marcella and Pilar walk downstairs to the parlor, only to see that the two of them have already arrived, fully fifteen minutes before five
o’clock—a mild social offense even for such familiar acquaintances. Both she and Pilar curtsey as the young men stand and bow, Marcella and Varrick and Septon smiling wryly through this still formal greeting, even though they have been in the house dozens of times by now. Both Varrick and Septon have, at different times, tried their hand at wooing Marcella. Septon lasted little more than an afternoon, but Varrick, being the more resilient of the two, endured for nearly an entire week, making him the most impressive of a thoroughly
un
impressive array of would-be suitors.

The proprieties taken care of, Marcella and Pilar settle into their customary seats and the conversation becomes less formal as the butler fills the gentlemen’s brandy glasses. Mama looks over at Papa with as much of a corrective glance as she can ever manage, hoping to at least slow him down so early in the evening, though it has no effect. And then it is the usual sort of banter, with some mention of business between the men, a trickle about the opera season, and then, somehow, a too-healthy dose of politics that finally piques Marcella’s interest, only to have the subject quickly changed by Mama just as Marcella is about to enter the fray.

“So when do you gentlemen go to Europe?” Mama asks Varrick and Septon. “It is the custom for young gentlemen to take a summer in Europe, yes?”

And Marcella can see the faint smile on her mother’s face at having taken away her fun before it even has begun. It is just as well, Marcella decides, since it affords her the opportunity to leave early for Mrs. Carlisle’s and the “recital” she will attend that evening.

IN THOSE FIRST YEARS IN
New York, she read every book and every newspaper she could get her hands on, and became the family’s resident grammarian to the point of annoyance. The servants became her closest friends and confidants, though that was very much a relative term. When they first arrived, there was just the cook, Mrs. Bridges, and Molly, the Irish maid, for Marcella to shadow. Molly did the shopping for the Arroyos in the early years, and Marcella tagged along with her whenever she could. They sometimes stopped to see Molly’s sister
Patricia, who worked in a house on Twenty-Third Street, and on one of those early visits Marcella met the widow who owned the house, Mrs. Carlisle.

Mrs. Carlisle was almost as old as Abuela, and of a similar disposition. She had been born in New York and was nearly thirty when she married a man from Savannah, spending seventeen years there until he died. Childless, she sold everything off and moved back home, carrying on the abolition work she had come to slowly in a decade-long conversion surrounded by slavery’s inescapable cruelty. To assist her in this crusade, she hired Miss Catherine Hardwicke, an ardent abolitionist who had been recommended to her by like-minded members of Mrs. Carlisle’s family from upstate New York. And the two of them, Mrs. Carlisle and Catherine, lived what seemed to Marcella an idyllic life of music and books and Friday afternoon teas with the newly created Ladies Abolition Society. Mrs. Carlisle was impressed with Marcella from the start, particularly with how proficient she had become in English within less than two years of arriving here. She told her she spoke with such an indistinguishable accent that people might easily mistake her for a native of New England or somewhere out west perhaps. As for Catherine, as she insisted on being called by Marcella, she seemed perfectly wonderful as well. Molly remarked that she was unlikely to ever marry, having reached the preposterous age of thirty-three, but that mattered little to Marcella, of course, who was instead fascinated with how Catherine had taught herself to play the pianoforte.

It wasn’t long before Marcella had convinced Catherine to give her lessons. Fourteen by then, Marcella in turn convinced her father that the four dollars a week such lessons would cost were well worth it. Of course, Catherine gave Marcella the lessons for free, delighted as both she and Mrs. Carlisle were to have the company of such a bright young girl. But Marcella insisted that her father wanted to contribute three dollars a week to the Ladies Abolition Society fund, the same one that went toward purchasing freedom for several slaves every year. The extra dollar went toward Marcella’s
personal
liberation fund, an enterprise no one, not even Catherine, not even Molly, not even the journal entries written to Abuela, knew anything about.

Through the intervening years Marcella grew closer to Catherine and Mrs. Carlisle, and it was generally accepted that her education be passed into their hands once her Mama had conceded to the inevitable. The contributions to the Ladies Abolition Society were then doubled as Papa insisted that he would pay the customary eight dollars a week that a personal tutor cost. And Marcella was then free to spend the better part of four days every week with Catherine and Mrs. Carlisle, though she managed to keep the two parts of her life remarkably separate from each other beyond the initial meeting and whatever Molly’s sister felt qualified as worthwhile gossip. Marcella went to Mrs. Carlisle’s house each day with Molly or the butler or even her Papa and brothers on their way to Wall Street. But by the time she was seventeen she was able to travel mostly by herself and always stayed for the Friday Teas of the Ladies Abolition Society. She had become an abolitionist mainly through the passion and influence of Mrs. Carlisle and Catherine, but as she grew older and understood more about the inner workings of the institution, despising how her father profited from it just as so many other men did, her devotion to the cause became fully her own, and no longer the residual effect of her friendships. Her visits to Mrs. Carlisle’s house soon grew to include Saturday mornings and even occasional Sunday afternoon “recitals” or “gallery expositions,” which were, as often as not, completely falsified. But above all, she was careful to keep the two worlds separate and was happy when Molly married a young man who took her out west, and any links between her own home on Sixty-Third Street, and her adoptive one forty blocks away, were diminished even further.